Vanadium Dark

by Ben Sheffield

  Vanadium Dark

  Ben Sheffield

  All text © Ben Sheffield except where noted

  Thanks go out to Gregory Cochran, Razib Khan, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and my family.

  Prelude 1 - Entrance to the Inferno...

  “I am the punishment of God... If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”

  ― Genghis Khan

  New York, New Year's Eve, 2024...

  The white van turned the corner into Times Square and merged into late-morning traffic.

  A man lolled back in the driver's seat—no hands on the steering wheel.

  He had touched the wheel of the self-driving vehicle exactly once since crossing the GWB—just a gentle touch, as if to remind the machine of his mastery, and then he'd pulled the hand away.

  He studied New York through two layers of glass - the tinted dash, and the glasses on his nose. Rows of billboards, marquees, and coloured lights, all of them calculated to skirt just beneath the edge of the city's light pollution limits.

  A glaze of neon covered the city. Cheap. Thrilling. Saccharine for eyes.

  During the day, Times Square had the dead gleam of fake jewellery. At night, it shone like a star too modest to rise into the sky. Even inside the car, he heard the buzz of thousands of voices. Tourists came from everywhere to ring in the new year.

  Everyone wanted something from New York – memories, culture, experiences.

  The driver didn't come to New York to take. He considered himself more of a giver.

  He pulled in to a metered parking spot and was about to get out when he heard and felt a banging fist on the side of his van.

  He turned his head. A NYPD cop.

  The big black cop shouted something, and spun his forefinger in a circle. The universal “roll down your window” gesture.

  He obeyed. “Can I help, officer?”

  “Yeah, buddy, you can. I saw you enter the street without using your turn signal.”

  “This is a self-driving car. The computer should have thrown the signal for me.”

  “It didn't. I was watching. Step out of the vehicle for a moment.”

  The driver got out. He had a small remote control on a keychain that allowed him to control the van without being inside it.

  “Activate your left turn signal.”

  The driver tried. The light remained dead. “Hmm. Bulb's gone. I wonder how long it's been like that.”

  The cop scowled. “Are you the owner of this vehicle?”

  “I am.”

  “Can I see some paperwork?”

  The driver produced his license and registration. The cop unclipped a RFID scanner from his belt and ran it over a microchip on the license paper. He looked over the cop’s shoulder at the LED readout as it checked the NYPD database for tickets, demerits, and other offenses.

  There weren't any.

  The cop nodded and handed back the paperwork. “That's fine. You're free to go.”

  “Will I get a ticket?”

  “Naw, I couldn't do that to a man on New Year's Eve. Just get that light fixed, okay? There's a mechanic on East Thirty-Fifth that's open over the holidays. Best to get these things sorted out, right?”

  “Sure, I will. And thanks.” The driver smiled.

  “Say, where are you from? I can't place your accent.”

  “I'm from Portland. I'm actually not here to celebrate. My daughter's coming from back from a vacation in Cancun, and she asked if I could pick her up.”

  “Cancun? Aw, that's such a kid place to go. I've got some time off coming up, and I hope to spend it in the Adirondacks wearing orange. You much of a huntin' man?”

  “Can't say I am.”

  “Well, it kicks the shit out of police work. Have a good day, man.”

  “You too. And all the best with your hunting trip. It'll be a good one, I'm sure.”

  He reached into his pocket and pressed a button.

  The uranium bomb in the van went off.

  * * *

  New York was torn apart.

  Nearly 3kg of uranium-235 fissioned in a colossal fireball. A white-hot sphere of light expanded outward to more than a quarter of a mile in every direction. The temperature at the fireball's surface was more than 6,000 °C. Everything in its path – steel, concrete, brick – was instantly annihilated.

  The fireball reached its limit, but the shockwave it generated continued.

  The 20psi blast wave ripped through Manhattan at the speed of sound, reducing the core of the city to rubble. The Empire State building flattened like a child's sandcastle. The Madison Square Gardens were stripped clean of foliage. Terrible pressures flowing downward through the earth caved in the New York subway.

  The shockwave spread out from the epicenter like a hammer blow, taking down buildings as far away as the Brooklyn Bridge. The devastation was total. Skyscrapers built for the ages were blasted away sideways in a hail of flying steel. Storms of fire carried twenty-ton girders and immense telephone poles up into the atmosphere.

  The sky itself was rent by the blast. Clouds formed before the surge of hot irradiated air, and beneath them, a blizzard of rubble, dust, and flame swirled in an eerie gestalt, guided by crosswinds and convection currents of heat. Lightning flashed, and thunder roared, as if in eulogy to the dead millions.

  Fires broke out on buildings many miles away, stoked by blasts of superheated air. The thermal pulse ejected a vast column of hot gas up into the air, forming a pillar of iridescent fire over the city.

  Thousands of tons of debris shot into the air on the fiery updraft, where they rose and gathered in the lower atmosphere. Soon, the density of the atmosphere was less than the density of the cloud, and the debris started to sink.

  A mushroom cloud now crowned New York, an incredible cumulus of radiation and ash. The cloud stood forty thousand feet in the year, towering over the destruction.

  New York was no more. It was now the home of the dead and the unlucky.

  They weren't the same people.

  * * *

  Tyrone Spaulding was at his cousin's apartment in Long Island. Lamont had just applied for and gotten what they both called a “heater,” and he was eager to show it off. Tyrone was amazed by both how much information on gun safety Lamont had retained and how little of it he was applying.

  After the second time the 9mm barrel idly drifted over Tyrone while Lamont was talking, he opened his mouth to say something.

  No words left his mouth.

  White light blazed into the apartment through the cracks in the closed blinds.

  Brilliant, unearthly light flooded the room, turning their tiny apartment into the set of a Jodorowski art movie.

  “What the—”

  Finally, after what seemed to be several seconds, the intense light faded away, and then...

  VrrooooooOOOMMMMMM...

  The rumbling intensified into a roar, gaining strength until it hurt Tyrone's ears. Animal instincts rose. Panic. Flight.

  Cracks and splits rent the wall. They heard screeching of metal from within the apartment. Tyrone felt an utterly terrifying sinking feeling as a corner of the room sagged lower.

  He and his cousin cried out and crouched down, neither of them moving their feet, as though their footfalls could be the critical factor that doomed the apartment.

  One minute.

  Two minutes.

  The rumbling did not lessen.

  “What the fuck is this shit?” shouted Lamont. Tyrone had to lip read. All he could hear was fractured syllables. “... at... uck... .it?”

  “I don't know. Look out the window.”

  Gingerly, Lamont stepped over to the vibrating windowsill and pulled back the blinds.


  He stuck his head out the window and screamed.

  Screamed and screamed.

  “What's going on?” Tyrone asked.

  “We're fucked, man! It's all over!”

  “Whatcha talking about?”

  His cousin spun, launched himself across the room, and grabbed Tyrone's shoulders. “We're dead! We're both dead!”

  Tyrone pulled his cousin's hands away. “Calm down, man. Be cool. What's going on?”

  Lamont either couldn't hear, wasn't listening, or both. His next movements were simple and articulate.

  He found the 9mm on the floor. He put the barrel in his mouth and snapped the safety off.

  For the few seconds that mattered, Tyrone found himself unable to move.

  The roaring sound continued without release.

  It still wasn't enough to drown out the sound of the gunshot.

  The cousins recoiled in different directions – Tyrone propelled by shock and horror, Lamont propelled by a 9mm bullet in his brain.

  Tyrone's back thumped against the shaking wall. He stared at the man in front of him in a dreamlike daze.

  Lamont lay on the ground, 9mm heater still in his hand, a patina of blood pouring out over the floor from the back of his head. Red droplets hung in a spray across the wall like a graffiti tag.

  Tyrone could not look at his cousin's face or even be in that room a moment longer.

  He bolted for the stairs like a wild animal, his slippered feet banging on the metal slats. He saw other people running ahead of him and heard more behind him. They did not matter.

  Now, he lived in a universe of one.

  Had an earthquake struck the city?

  As he ran down the stairway he realized that nothing was straight. The sharp planes and right angles of the New York Housing Commission had warped and been made crooked like a circus funhouse.

  He reached the lopsided doorway and ran out into the street. A hard, warm wind blew across his shaven crown.

  He looked to the west, the direction the flash had come from.

  “Oh, man... oh, man... ” He breathed these words over and over, mauling the two syllables between teeth and tongue.

  He'd stepped out into hell.

  An enormous cloud ascended skyward from Manhattan, so high that he strained his neck trying to see its top. Plumes of fire and coruscating eddies of ash wove though it like filigrees on a city-spanning funeral dress.

  He noticed the terrified people, the emergency sirens, the papers blown across the ground by the hell blast from the west.

  Tyrone ran toward the explosion.

  A bomb. A big one. He knew that the prevailing winds in NYC blew out toward Long Island. He was most likely in the fallout zone.

  These things were only of academic importance. His whole world was burning. New York had been gutted like a junked car.

  He ran several miles in his slippers, not even noticing his exhaustion. He felt like an ailing and terrified brain strapped to an indefatigable iron body. His legs pumped and moved, and his only thoughts were of death and burning.

  The flesh was willing. The spirit was weak.

  The heat increased, and the air thickened with smoke. Soon he saw the burning buildings.

  The full reality of what was happening sank in to his legs, and they could no longer run.

  There was no reason to run, was there? Nothing he could do would make the situation any better or any worse.

  He walked through the blazing ruins of New York, goggling at everything. Corner bodegas blazed. Fruit stands roasted in splashes of blue and green, tattered remnants of what had existed five minutes before.

  His nose and throat burned, and he coughed, eyes watering.

  The further he went, the worse the destruction got. Tyrone looked again at the people and saw how badly burned from radiation many of them were.

  Livid red welts on bare shoulders—lobster-red skin showing around shirts and bra straps—people ran through the street, faces covered in ugly pustules and blisters, or with their skin simply falling off their faces.

  The smell...

  “Good God... ”

  He saw people stumbling and falling and entirely naked figures running through the streets. He realized that horrible force must have torn their clothes from their bodies.

  Nobody made any sound. That frightened him more than anything. Tyrone was surrounded by half-cooked humans, and nobody said anything.

  No cries for help. No screams.

  The crackling flames and gales of hot wind were the only sounds.

  He kept on going, no longer keeping track of what street he was on, not even knowing if New York had streets anymore.

  I never got a chance to say goodbye to the corner stands. He thought this absurd thought with the seriousness of a rosary.

  From behind a twisted bus stop sign shambled the remains of a young woman, unclothed and partially de-fleshed. Huge sections of skin were burnt black, and red smiles of tissue showed underneath rips and tears in her charred skin. Part of her left arm was missing, and an exposed section of white bone glistened.

  She waved her arm and stump and gibbered. Tyrone stared at the spectre, trying to fathom how this thing could have been a person.

  “Hey, you! Over here! The bus is running late, if you want to go to Dolce and Gabbana you'll have to catch the... catch the... ”

  She ran off mid sentence and dashed straight into the bus stop. She rebounded straight off it, almost cartoonishly, and fell to the ground. Tyrone heard a loud pop.

  Almost immediately, milky white fluid spread out from around her chest. Tyrone stared at her stupidly until he realized that she had ruptured a silicon implant.

  Tyrone kept moving, progressing toward Brooklyn, following the compass of his heart. He tried not to look around. He did not want to have eyes or any of his senses. He wanted to be blind, deaf, and without a sense of smell. What good were senses to him now?

  Finally, he came to what had been Brooklyn Bridge.

  The massive city-linking structure had collapsed into the river. Rubble and untold miles of steel cable now drifted in the East River, leaving a truncated end at either side.

  He gazed into the water, his brain threatening insurrection with every new thing he saw.

  Thousands of bodies floated in the water, human logs, scorched and burned, drifting out to sea.

  So relaxed, so calm, so natural looking. Surely things had always been this way. Surely the East River had always been covered in a carpet of bodies.

  He realized that the loss of the bridge was a blessing.

  Otherwise, Tyrone would have crossed into Manhattan. He would have been compelled by his own curiosity. As it was, he could only look across the expanse of water and stare at the mountains of rubble, steel, and fire raging that had been a city.

  How many people were dead?

  Who would bury them, or mourn them? Who would fish the bodies out of the river? New York was broken beyond repair. Try to fix anything and the million broken things left would bear witness to your futility.

  Every footstep he took was on irradiated ground. Every breath he took sucked air from an abattoir.

  Could life go on anywhere after this?

  He turned around and started back toward Long Island. Back to his apartment.

  He picked the 9mm off the ground and shot himself too.

  Prelude 2: The Eyemaker

  She was born in Seoul, in 1994.

  In secondary school, three IQ tests were administered. On the Stanford-Binet she scored 165. On the Wechsler Intelligence Scale she scored 160. On Hoeflin's Mega Test she scored 179.

  Sun-Hi Shin was a genuine child prodigy.

  She was fast-tracked through every academic institution she attended. Her parents, her teachers, and her professors almost threw her towards a doctorate.

  At MIT she graduated fourth in a class of three hundred. Molecular engineering. She was fifteen years old.

  After her postgrad studies she went to work for an aer
ospace corporation, working on frictionless coatings for planes – surfaces that retarded heat down to the nano scale. In this period, she met many members of the USAF.

  The years flew by. She turned thirty. She wanted a child, but not a husband. Time for a different sort of molecular engineering.

  She solicited in-vitro fertilization, using a discreet company that catered to career women in her position. In late 2024, she gave birth to Kwan.

  That was the year New York was destroyed by a nuclear bomb on New Year's Eve. Three million died. She remembered cradling the baby in her arms and seeing black rain falling across New Jersey in news broadcasts.

  Soon, fish were being caught with two heads.

  Then, babies were being born with two heads.

  The area was so profoundly irradiated that it would be uninhabitable for decades. New York was a modern Carthage, fields salted by Romans so that nothing would grow.

  Six different terrorist organisations in four different countries claimed credit for the attack, but no leads or evidence could be salvaged from New York. Overnight, martial law was declared.

  The United States went to war against Iran and Syria. Trident Boats patrolled the Persian Gulf.

  Governments were overthrown. Russia went to the brink of initiating World War III and then pulled back its hand.

  The culpable party for the attacks was never found. But the message was clear: the US could not protect itself.

  Populism rose within the country. Citizens paid taxes, swore oaths—but where was the security?

  Would there be a mushroom cloud over Los Angeles next? Chicago?

  A blast hole had been ripped in the Stars and Stripes. Safety now weighed higher than freedom in the public mind. No candidate failed to exploit this.

  During this time, Sun-Hi found herself shifting more and more toward nanotechnology with a military application. She had not planned to spend her life helping Boeing improve its miles per gallon in the air. Civilian work was dull.

  After a few years of working for military contractors, her phone rang.

  Yes, of course she was available.